Part 1 - Afterthought Typography, Blogs and Websites
Part 2 - Good Type Gone Bad, Tutorials and Tools
Part 3 - The Kerning Curve, Free Fonts and Other Resources

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then it would follow that the words flowing free from the pen are at the heart of it’s power. The same can be said of the words used in a design, and they need to be considered with the weight of importance they command. And it seems, most designers have this figured out.

The Kerning Curve

We couldn’t talk about typography and not mention the pet peeviest of careless mistakes that can turn truly tremendous type into a usability nightmare, that grants a carelessness to it’s character’s style. Improper kerning, or for that matter, not kerning at all creates an uneven appearance to your type, as the character spacing is not measured and fluid. Now we are not talking about tracking here, for there is a very distinctive, one daresay, artistic difference between the two.

You see, Tracking increases the space between all characters evenly, without pairing consideration being taken at all. Meanwhile, Kerning spaces based on character pairs, making sure that they line up well with each other, working harmoniously and not obtrusively. Kerning, as mentioned earlier, is the more artistic approach to the typography, giving it the sort of fluidity of handwritten text that is appealing to the eye. Though it may be more time consuming, creating a font should be given the precision and care of any creative endeavor, and the extra time will pay off with a spectacularly spaced type with a seamless style.

Now not all font makers take kerning into consideration when crafting their creation (though they should), so don’t take for granted when using a font, that you won’t need to do some manual adjusting and tweaking yourself to get a succinctly kerned type. Don’t think, if you aren’t crafting fonts that you don’t need to know about kerning characters. As a designer, each and every time you use a font in your work, you should be aware of and examining the character spacing to make sure you are not compromising the overall graceful motion of your work with the typography. So take the time for learning about kerning and it will pay off for your designs in the end.

Free Fonts

In this, the final installment of the series, we wanted to point you in the direction of some of our favorite haunts for finding free fonts (wow, that rhymed…just kidding that was totally intentional.). Whenever we are in need of an interesting font that won’t break our budget, these are the first cyberspace stops we make in our search!

dafont

exljbris Font Foundry

Fontleech

Abstract Fonts

1001 Free Fonts

Search Free Fonts

Font River

Other Resources

We’ve gathered together some other random resources for you that didn’t necessarily qualify under some of the other headings we’ve had, but that we wouldn’t feel right about excluding from the series. So here they are in no particular order, some of the other typography resources we love so much!

Just Creative Design’s Type Classification Ebook

All Good Things Typography

Web Typography Style Guide

30 Inspiring Flickr Groups on Typography

Fuel Your Creativity’s Typography is Sexy Series - Part 2 - Part 3

Web Typography Cheat Sheet

The Principles of Beautiful Typography

101 Typography Resources for Web Designers

Conglomerfont

A Huge Roundup of Typography Blogs, Resources, Articles, Galleries & Tools

Picture For Me: Typography

Inspirational Typography

Seeing as this the final segment, we felt that we would throw in an extra large dose of inspirational typography. We rummaged through the far reaches of the world wide web to collect more stunning examples to feature for you here. Enjoy, and thank you for checking out the series! Happy typographying…